Encouraging public service improvement through shared learning and knowledge exchange

Acquiring data for a cutting edge audit office

How is the Wales Audit Office working to ensure that it provides audit that’s fit for the future? Dyfrig Williams blogs below on his work with the Cutting Edge Audit project.

Over the past few months, I’ve been working on the Cutting Edge Audit project, which looks at how the Wales Audit Office can challenge our existing use of data and technology and assumptions that we normally take for granted. We’re thinking radically about how we might use new technology to transform the way that we work.

It’s been a fantastic piece of work to undertake, which has really put that radical thinking into practice. The project’s being led by my colleague Steve Lisle, who is reporting directly to the Auditor General for Wales. This has meant that we’ve moved away from hierarchy into a much flatter structure. We’ve also been outcome focussed – we’ve been testing and prototyping as we go so that our risks are well managed and that we learn from failure.

I’ve been working on how the Wales Audit Office acquires data to give us deeper knowledge and fresh insight.

Data Maturity

It was helpful to think about Data Maturity when we were doing this work. Data Maturity is the journey towards improvement and increased capability in using data. Data Orchard have used this model (which I’ve nicked from a great post by Ben Proctor) of stages in an organisation’s development:

Ad-hoc gathering of data in some areas

Pulling data together centrally

Starting to use data looking backwards

Using data in real time to manage the organisation and move resources rapidly

Modelling the future before making decisions to enable better decisions to be taken

Modelling the future the organisation wants and working backwards to understand what needs to happen now to deliver that future

This is very much a journey for us as an organisation, but it has helped to inform my thinking. It’s helped me think about how we get to point 6, where we’re modelling the future that the organisation is working towards, and ensure that the things that I’m working on set us out on the right path beyond the lifespan of the Cutting Edge project.

My prototypes

I’ve been working on two different tests within this field. The first is an Open Data prototype, which has been more challenging than I expected because the Wales Audit Office is a secondary user of data. This means that we use data that is gathered by others, so we don’t always have the right to share it. I have managed to find a useful dataset though, so my next step is to set it free into the world and look at the challenges around how we can make it as useful as possible.

I’ve been putting the Good Practice Exchange’s principles into practice in this work by visiting other organisations to learn about the work they’re already doing because there’s no point reinventing the wheel. I’ve also been thinking about how we adapt rather than adopt their work to suit our organisational needs, because after all, a one-size-fits-all approach never works.

My second piece of work has been looking at how we enable our staff to make better use of data, thereby minimising the audit burden. I’m looking at how we can bring together data from public bodies in a way that makes it easy to access, open to everyone, and give us an improved insight into the performance of the Welsh public sector, and international comparators. I’ve been talking to our staff so that I can better understand what type of approach would be useful to them. I’ve developed personas to help guide our work in this area, which will shape the next phase of this work and ensure that my part of the final report is focused on user need.

Iteration

I’ll be writing future posts to share my approaches, what I’ve learnt and what I would do differently next time. We are working iteratively so that we learn from each development and how we can build on that learning going forwards. If those prototypes don’t work, we’ll be looking to learn from failure and see what the organisation can do differently in the future.

At all our Good Practice Exchange seminars we hear that public services can’t continue to work in the same way in these austere times. It’s been great working on a practical project at the Wales Audit Office, as we’re getting to grips with those same challenges and applying new thinking to our work.